Many years ago in 2012, myself and a small team of people along with Coffee Fest Trade Shows had the pleasure of developing and running a competition called "America's Best Coffee House".

The first of it's kind team cafe competition that was, IMO, the most accurate to real cafe work competition ever made. To this day it remains unmatched in showcasing true-to-life barista skills that working baristas regularly engage in.

We shipped and assembled on the show floor a fully functional coffee bar across the country 3x a year. (From POS, pour-over bar, back bar with sinks, front bar etc. the works!) Through a stringent application process including video submissions, written apps, and secret shopping, we invited cafe teams made up exclusively of 3 current baristas from that company to run this bar with a 10 min open shift, 30 min live bar serving actual customers from the show floor who also had weighted judging slips on their receipts, and a 10 min closing shift. Along with our own standard cafe menu they were required to make, they brought their own coffee, sig drinks, pour over kettles etc. We had 3 judges judging all aspects of the competition and the teams never knew when the drinks they made would be judge by us since secret shoppers in the queue were instructed to deliver a range of drinks at random.

It was fantastic, complicated, effective, and expensive to produce (hence why we closed up shop in 2015) but the lessons we learned from the display of teamwork, cleanliness, communication, workflow, QC, hospitality, and more were incredible. In this episode I am going to reminisce back to those competitions a bit and talk about the lessons and insights that were drawn from those intense real-life competitions and how they apply directly to your cafe. Will we ever see this competition rise up once more? Maybe not. But we can all raise our own standards and each pursue being the "Best Coffee House" where we are for the people we serve and serve with. Be sure to click the link below for a video produced during that time to see a slice of what we did.

(Shout out to Joshua Boyt, Jesse Harriott, Jessica Rice, Terry Ziniewicz, Ryan Soeder, Pete Licata, Danny Loeschen, Aaron O'neal, and the Coffee Fest director at the time, David Heilbrunn.)

We discuss:

Integrity
Real life vs on stage
How time finds you out
Prepare yourself for the unexpected
You never know ow who is judging
Team work
Having a plan but being flexible
Trusting the standards

Links:

Video montage of America's Best Coffee House

Related Episodes:

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